I’m an Old Communist Hag

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Nicolae Ceausescu, Former Dictator,

Your specter looms large over modern-day Romanian life in Stere Gulea’s new film I’m an Old Communist Hag. Televisions buzz and chatter with impending news of a DNA test that will determine whether the bodies buried in your gravesite indeed belong to you and your wife. Meanwhile, a documentary is being shot about life during The Golden Era of Ceausescu (as you, yourself, so demurely christened it), requiring hundreds of volunteers to recreate the scenes of state-orchestrated adoration that used to greet you each time your helicopter alit or your motorcade zipped through the streets. Thankfully, this film doesn’t have to strain nearly as hard to make an impression.

One of those volunteers is Emelia, a sixty-something woman living modestly in a Bucharest suburb with her vendor husband. When she receives word that her daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law will be visiting from Canada, she seeks a small loan to feed her guests for the week. And it’s at one of these dinners that Emelia is revealed to be the communist hag of the title; pressed by her daughter, she admits that, yes, she preferred your good old days of communism to the shaky free market that threatens each day to swallow her family up.

This is a surprisingly common sentiment. Democracy hasn’t been a cakewalk for Romania. And neither has membership in the European Union. Many who lived through your rule are nostalgic for its security and steadiness. Romania always seemed to be the most progressive of Eastern Bloc nations (at least from the West’s point-of-view), but while you were careful to distance yourself from Russia’s geopolitical influence, you were, perhaps, the leader who carried forth Stalin’s style of authoritarian rule most vigorously—what with the crippling economic policies and the brutal suppression of dissenting viewpoints and all.

Those aren’t necessarily the things Emilia is pining for in this film. Even she isn’t sure what she misses exactly. For all the talk of the halcyon years of stable housing and employment, Emilia recalls, in a series of flashbacks, being kept away from her family in the days leading up to one of your factory visits. The reason? It’s never clear whether it was your phobia of germs or your sense of paranoia that required her to be quarantined before shaking your hand, which makes the situation even more disturbing. There is no reason. But Emilia nonetheless complies.

As played by the renowned Romanian actress Luminita Gheorghiu, Emilia is stout and strong-hearted and also completely adrift in the contemporary world; she frets over the worldwide financial crisis; she goes to get her hair cut and comes back with a bright-red punkish do. This sort of incarnate performance is deserving of no small number of superlatives, though what those superlatives might be, I can’t quite say. All of the adjective and metaphors typically used to describe great acting all seem a little too pompous. And if there’s one thing her performance isn’t, it’s pompous.

See, that’s the problem with epithets, Nicolae: they don’t aggrandize a person; they obscure. You may have created around yourself the most impressive cult of personality in Eastern Europe when that part of the world was replete with big personalities, but the names you gave yourself – genius, demiurge, titan, Prince Charming – are heavy with their own meaning, and do nothing, today, to define what kind of man you were. They do, however, shed a bit of light on what kind of leader you were.

Director Stere Gulea is a survivor of the lean artistic years under your rule – he made several films in the 70s and 80s, during the Communist studio system – and whether or not he shares Emilia’s conflicted feelings about Romania’s past, this much is for certain: he knows better than to give you credit for her wistfulness. It’s herself that she misses. The innocence of her daughter. The simplicity of youth. But not you. Sure, your specter looms large over this film. But that’s all you are, anymore: a ghost.

Sincerely,

Jared Young

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

The Phantom Father

Dear Barry Gifford, Co-writer and Actor,

Like the main character in The Phantom Father, I felt compelled to do some research about history. Specifically, your history. I was curious how someone with a decidedly non-Romanian name gets not only a small role, but a co-writer credit on a Romanian film. And then I felt shame. You wrote Wild at Heart! And Lost Highway! I love David Lynch – I should know this!

With that embarrassing hole in my cinematic knowledge filled in, the pieces quickly fell into place. Your involvement with the movie suddenly made a lot more sense: the road movie structure; the off-the-wall gangster characters; the maybe-they-are, maybe-they-aren’t dream sequences. Only one thing seemed to not fit; how did this become a romantic comedy?

I’m guessing this is where director and co-writer Lucian Georgescu comes in. He must have thought it would help to lighten the mood by focusing on blossoming love. Well, if he did, he was wrong. It’s not so much that this aspect is bad—the slow and tentative relationship feels honest—it’s that when everything else comes in, the movie completely derails.

Robert Traum (Marcel Lures, in a stiff performance, possibly due to his not-very-successful American accent) is an American professor who travels to Romania to research his Romanian Jewish rots and learn about the father he barely knew. There he meets Tanya (Mihaela Sirbu, relaxed and charming), a local historian who agrees to be his driver and guide. There’s your road movie. I suppose adding some light romance was a pretty simple graft. I could have seen this becoming one of those foreign movies that, as promised in 1990s-era Miramax trailers, “celebrates everything you love about life!”

But there’s more. The couple’s search eventually leads them in pursuit of Sami, one of Robert’s father’s oldest friends. Sami travels the countryside in a caravan, showing movies in an ad-hoc theatre. He’s also pursued by gangsters. We are told he was kicked out of his town by a corrupt mayor who is fixing to replace Sami’s theatre with a shopping mall, even though his dilapidated town looks to have a population of 300. For some reason though, the mayor and his two gangster thugs still chase Sami through the countryside and remind him that no one likes the movies he shows. That’s about as threatening as they get.

Once all these characters are introduced, The Phantom Father really doesn’t know what to focus on anymore. Is it about Robert’s relationship to his past? His interest in Tanya? Is it a caper about outsmarting the gangsters? Is Robert imagining all of this? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’d like you to tell me because the film never answers them.

Things got so muddy that by the end, I was wondering if large portions of what I saw were dream sequences. There is one for-sure sequence around the film’s midpoint that is clearly a dream, but refreshingly, didn’t end with a character waking up from sleep. That omission—along with an elliptical, disruptive editing style that I couldn’t find any rhyme or reason for—made me question the reality of anything that came after it, especially as things got more outlandish and possibly violent. (Yes, possibly more violent: a secondary, harmless character seems to meet an untimely, uncalled-for end. Off-camera. I think.)

So yes, Barry, I’m throwing all of this back to you because, as the original source for this material, you must know where things came apart. Right? Maybe you can even describe it all to me, DVD commentary-style, as I watch the movie again. The same way a character in The Phantom Father, in a key moment, explains exactly what we’re seeing in an old silent film, instead of letting the images tell the story. You know, the way movies are supposed to work.

Dreamily—or not?—yours,

Casey

Status: Return to Sender (2/5)